Publication Date

Fall 2024

Degree Type

Master's Project

Degree Name

Master of Science in Computer Science (MSCS)

Department

Computer Science

First Advisor

Chris Pollett

Second Advisor

Navrati Saxena

Third Advisor

Genya Ishigaki

Keywords

Single file PHP servers, Routing engines, HTTP/2, Header compression

Abstract

As a result of advancement in technology the web and email servers have greatly expanded in size.
This has created a need for miniaturization, and people are trying to minimize technology whilst
making it fast and efficient. This report discusses the development of a set of servers aligned with
the miniaturization trend: Atto servers. These are simple to use single file PHP servers created for
moderate usages including web traffic and email tasks. The purpose of this project is to develop
small server solutions which could act as working counterparts of products like Apache or Nginx.
It makes the server appropriate for use in educational contexts and readily insertable into other use
cases. The project entails the improvements added to the existing Atto server framework. It builds
on top of this server model which is proficient of managing HTTP requests most effectively. The
implementations consist of enabling security mechanisms for handing TLS, enabling HTTP/2
support, HPack and Huffman encoding for header compression, as well as the implementation of
SMTP and IMAP commands for the email server. This report provides a comprehensive overview
of the existing Atto server framework, and the larger-scale improvements added to it. It also
discusses the background, preliminary work done in the first semester, and the experiments
performed on the final project, demonstrating its overall functional improvements and other
metrics.

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Available for download on Wednesday, December 31, 2025

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